# The Varieties of Consciousness  ## Metadata - Author: [[Uriah Kriegel]] - Full Title: The Varieties of Consciousness - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Document Tags: [[agentive phenomenology]] - Summary: The text discusses different types of phenomenal consciousness, such as cognitive, conative, and emotional phenomenology. The author argues that certain types of phenomenology are primitive and irreducible to others, while some can be explained as combinations of different types. The text presents thought experiments and arguments to support the idea of primitive cognitive and conative phenomenology. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/193410512 - Source File: The Varieties of Consciousness by Uriah Kriegel .pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > ‌ [](https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/193410512/#bookmark8)[2](https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/193410512/#bookmark8) ‌ > [Conative Phenomenology](https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/193410512/#bookmark8) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gbgeqxat5tg4p23hmtt5nz)) - Note: Chapter 2. Conative > What seems to characterize conative states is their *value-commitment* (Brentano 1874: 239). To want ice cream, to wish for ice cream, to like ice cream, to approve of ice cream—all these commit to the goodness of ice cream. The notion of good- ness at play here is maximally neutral—a kind of completely generic goodness. It covers both moral and other kinds of goodness (e.g., aesthetic). It covers rela- tive goodness (“good for”) and absolute goodness (good *tout court*). It covers the goodness of states of affairs, but also the goodness of actions (“rightness”), mental states (“fittingness”), and persons (“virtue”). It covers intrinsic and final goodness, as well as instrumental goodness. We may call this *generic goodness*, or goodnessg for short. Positive conative states (such as liking or approving of something) are characterized by their goodnessg-commitment; negative ones (disliking, disapproving) by their badnessG-commitment. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jejfmba7e2165njnsxp629yd)) - Tags: [[kriegel paper]] > In the cognitive case, our demarcation appealed to specifically *nonsen- sory* representing-as-true, in order to rule out perception. Something similar is needed in the conative case, since pleasure and pain seem to represent-as- > valuableG their objects: when one takes pleasure in an espresso, one’s pleasure represents-as-goodG the espresso. But pleasure seems too sensory, or sensuous, to qualify as conative. To enjoy something is not an act of the will! ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jex59d9az1547j3r653wd58p)) > In contrast, a decision’s connection to action is *categorical*: in making the decision to eat the cake, you commit to acting on it, *period*. The commitment is unconditional. From Ricœur’s perspective, this experience of categorical pull to action is the distinguishing mark of decision (Ricœur 1950: 70). > (It is in this respect that decision is arguably the fundamental exercise of the will. It is only when a decision has been made that we experience the will actually being deployed. A desire can be formed without any will-deployment ensuing.) > Importantly, this too is an *attitudinal* feature of decision. For a decision may well have a hypothetical *content*. I can decide that I will visit Grandma next week if my sister does not. The decision’s content is hypothetical. But my commit- ment to it is categorical: for me to not go despite my sister not going, say because of some overriding considerations, is for me to *undo* or *go back on* my decision. By contrast, I can desire to visit Grandma next week if my sister does not and *still* not go through with it without losing the desire (it may simply be overridden). Indeed, I may have a desire with a categorical content (e.g., to visit Grandma) and yet not go—precisely because my commitment to that content is not itself categorical. > The categorical pull-to-action feel is decision’s most important phenomenal property. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jf5ersa3c5fykckmm64hwk0t)) > A related phenomenal property is what we may call *felt stake*: in making a decision to do something, I acquire a stake in what happens. Thus, when I decide to get ice cream, *it matters* to me whether or not I get it. This felt stake creates > a certain tension in my consciousness, relieved only by the actual getting of the ice cream (more on this in §5). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jf5esqdcxt7maw1sgj1hdthy)) > In other words: if the “formal object” of conation is *generic* goodness, then different cona- tive states are directed at different kinds of *specific* goodness. I now wish to argue that decision’s categorical pull-to-action feel casts decision as directed at *the right*. If so, it is characterized by the specific attitudinal feature of nonsensuous presenting-as-right. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jf5evfent3wt13pwnz6hanv1)) > conative phenomenology is in the first instance a phenomenology as of deciding-cum-trying. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jf5f5k4kkpayghsx0pq5tg02)) > When one conceives that some water is not H2O, one may experience sensory images of > a watery substance, but it is not part of the *concept* of conceiving that such imagery must occur. In sum, my claim is that belief is to perception what con- ception is to imagination, not what propositional imagination is to objectual imagination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7tbvh5spj231b1vc1dgcpan)) > On the objector’s suggestion, I can tell by introspection whether my current experience is imaginative or perceptual by registering the presence or absence of this personal-level process. No difference need be assumed between the *phenomenal characters* of the perceiving and the imagining.10 > The obvious problem with this is that it does not extend to mental images formed through subpersonal processes—what the Greeks called *phantasia*. When an unbidden image of a smiling octopus pops into my mind, the pro- cess producing it is introspectively inaccessible to me—the popping is some- thing that happens to me, not something that I do. I feel receptive and passive rather than spontaneous and active. And yet I am perfectly capable of telling whether my experience is perceptual or phantasmagoric. So there must be a deeper dimension along which these differ. We may then reasonably assume ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7td1ftfn65pan6tgan6wft0)) > A better objection is that while the present account suits experiences pro- duced through voluntary exercise of the imagination, it is inadequate for unbid- den imaginative experiences. When the image of a smiling octopus just pops into my mind, the octopus is not experienced as nonexistent the way it is when I deliberately conjure up an image of it. Calling these kinds of unbidden imagina- tive experiences “phantasmagoric experiences,” we may put the objection as fol- lows: it seems introspectively inaccurate to say that phantasmagoric experiences are attitudinally committed to the unreality of their objects. Instead, they seem attitudinally silent on their object’s ontological status. > There are two possible reactions to this objection. The first and simpler is to deny that phantasmagoric experience is noncommittal in the way claimed. It might be suggested, for example, that the main difference between phantas- magoric and non-phantasmagoric imaginative experience is that only the latter involves a phenomenology of doing the imagining (a phenomenology of agency), and that this difference nowise entrains a difference concerning the way the object imagined is presented. The other reaction concedes that the objection is phenomenologically accurate, and proceeds to divide imaginative experiences into two types: the first (formed by active, deliberate, voluntary, endogenous, personal-level exercise of the imagination) present-as-nonexistent their object, but the other (formed by subpersonal processes uncontrolled by the subject) *merely-present* their objects (without taking a stand on their ontological status). The difference is somewhat analogous to the difference between disbelieving that *p* and entertaining that *p*: the former presents-as-false *p*, the latter merely- presents *p*. In a way, the present distinction between non-phantasmagoric and phantasmagoric imagination is simply the sensory analog. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7tddx4nepjy0hfdeywcmvvw)) > For any imaginative experience E, E is the imaginative experience *it is* (rather than another imaginative experience) because it bears the con- tent it does, and E is an imaginative experience *at all* (rather than a non-imaginative experience) because it employs the attitude it does. > For example, an imaginative experience as of a mustard-colored dog is the imag- inative experience it is because it is *as of a mustard-colored dog*, and is an imagina- tive experience at all because it either (*a*) *sensorily presents-as-nonexistent* or (*b*) *sensorily merely-presents* the mustard-colored dog. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7tdk4tk2f5g0jtyvdy9a3s3)) > The Question of Taxonomy > The picture we end up with cites six second-layer phenomenal primitives, three sensory and three nonsensory. Arguably, there is a measure of pleasing parallel- ism between the two groups: perceptual and cognitive phenomenology “belong together,” conative and algedonic phenomenology “belong together,” and so do entertaining and imaginative phenomenology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7tdpgv0cwemsz2entv0qqnh)) > Together, they allow us to narrow the chasm between the scientific and the manifest image: what needs reconciling is no longer neuroscience and lived experience, but a functionalist framework for making sense of ourselves in terms of perception, belief, desire, and action and a phenomenological framework in terms of paradigmatic conscious experiences characterized by distinctive attitudinal features.16 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j7tf99eh0ywqxkngcxr8x05m)) > Elsewhere, I have argued that all conscious experience exhibits a phenome- nologically manifest presence to the subject, or subjective significance (Kriegel 2005a, 2009 ch.2). When I see a mustard-colored dog, there is a mustard-color-ish way it is like for me to have my visual experience. This “mustard-color-ish way it is like for me” involves two central dimensions: (i) the mustard-color-ish quality and > (ii) a for-me-ness by which it is experientially given to me as subject. This for-me- ness is, on my view, a *sine qua non* of all conscious experience, and therefore an invariant aspect of the stream of consciousness. It might be suggested that this experiential for-me-ness could serve as a seventh second-layer primitive. > However, this seems like the wrong way to think of for-me-ness. For-me-ness is not a self-standing and detachable quality in its own right, but a pervasive dimension infusing all phenomenology. Thus we should not posit for-me-ness alongside such phenomenal features as presenting-as-true, presenting-as-good, and so on; instead, we should reconceive these phenomenal attitudinal features as presenting*-to-me-*as-true, presenting*-to-me-*as-good, and so on. The subjec- tive significance or experiential givenness is a standing dimension of all of them, in virtue of which they are phenomenal features to begin with. Accordingly, we appreciate for-me-ness not by introspecting it in isolation from other phenom- enal features, but by grasping what is common to all phenomenal features; this is precisely why it is a *sine qua non* of all conscious experience. From this perspec- tive, for-me-ness does not seem like a seventh second-layer primitive so much as *the first-layer primitive*. Phenomenality as such *just is* for-me-ness. In other words, it is for-me-ness itself that divides into six species. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jexpfmk9xpnhh8xa3jgn865r)) > This suggestion is hampered by two considerations. First, although in ordi- nary language we only have predicates for two attentional properties (“atten- tive” and “inattentive”), plausibly the underlying reality is not binary, but involves a *continuum* from full to null attention. Secondly, although ordinary language offers us a verb for a mental act consisting essentially of attention, namely “attending to,” plausibly in reality one can only have *other* mental acts which are more or less attentive. Thus, to attend to *x* is typically just to observe *x* attentively. When we take these two considerations into account, it is hard to see the phenomenology of attention as a phenomenal determinable on a par with perceptual phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology, and so on. It is more natural to think of each of these determinables as varying in the degree of attention involved in experiencing them. When S experiences perceptual phe- nomenology attentively to degree Di, this experience is a specific determinate of > perceptual phenomenology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jexphwk5fmfpwv2fw4s4bx46)) > In aesthetics, there is a long tradition of discussing the nature of aesthetic experience. A traditional assumption in this debate is that aesthetic experience is something of a natural kind: although there is a variety of aesthetic expe- riences, there is some feature common and peculiar to them. Paintings, flow- ers, novels, palaces, rivers, etc. all afford very different aesthetic experiences, but these also have something in common. What they have in common may be called aesthetic phenomenology per se and suggested as a seventh primitive. Alternatively, there might be one species of aesthetic experience—one kind of encounter with one kind of beauty, or some other aesthetic property—that affords a phenomenology unlike anything else in life, a phenomenology irre- producible from any combination of other experiences we have. The experience of *encounter with the sublime* might be a good candidate. Hearing one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, reading one of Shakespeare’s better soliloquies, wit- nessing one of Messi’s spectacular slaloms, observing a manifestation of the aurora borealis, surveying Place de la Concorde from the entrance to Jeu de Paume: all these involve, it might be claimed, an attitudinal phenomenal feature of presenting-as-sublime the object experienced; this presenting-as-sublime is irreducible to any combination of familiar types of phenomenology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jexppb0f14azctq376afg9kf)) > I am open to such primitivism about the phenomenology of aesthetic expe- rience. But I note that reductive accounts of the experience of encounter with the sublime, as a combination of several more familiar experiential elements, are also antecedently plausible. Thus we may note that encounter with the sub- lime involves an element of paralyzing awe; a feeling of being in the presence of > ungraspable or infinite grandeur; a heightened sense of feeling alive, and of the open multitude of potentialities of life; an overwhelming but calm joy, sometimes tinged with great hope for humanity or for life itself; a dissipation of all anxiety as one fully assumes one’s tiny place in the fantastic theater of the universe. It is hard to tell whether an exhaustive enumeration of the variety of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional experiences characteristic of encounter with the sub- lime would not exhaust all there is to the phenomenology, making appeal to a sui generis presenting-as-sublime unnecessary. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jexppkaz433jeqkbn8cth9qe)) > More generally, I note that lead- ing philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience tend to characterize it reduc- tively in terms of the compresence of certain perceptual features. According to Beardsley (1958), for example, aesthetic experiences are characterized by focus, intensity, and unity. (Focus and intensity have to do with an alert attention to the object, unity with finding “coherence” and “completeness” in the object.) If this is the distinctive phenomenology of aesthetic experience, it is surely reduc- ible. And although many now reject Beardsley’s account (see Dickie 1965 for an influential critique), newer views still tend to account for aesthetic experience in terms of combinations of perceptual features (see Iseminger 2003 for review). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jexpmrz513kjgf7bc9abnr6f)) > To obtain a fuller, public characterization of different types of cognitive phe- > nomenology, we might consider constructing various Ramsey sentences for > them (see Ramsey 1931, Lewis 1966, 1972). A Ramsey sentence is produced > by collecting a large number of “platitudes” about that which one wishes to > elucidate, stringing them into a long conjunction, replacing occurrences of the > “elucidandum” with a free variable, and prefixing the whole thing with the exis- > tential quantifier. (Importantly, “platitude” here need not mean an obvious or > pedestrian statement; it only means a statement about surface features of the elu- > cidandum’s referent.) The result is a complex description which may be satisfied > better or worse by different eligible referents of the elucidandum. Suppose now > that the platitudes appealed to are all phenomenological, in the sense that they > cite phenomenal features. Then the result may be thought of as a phenomeno- > logical characterization of the target phenomenon.41 > We may call such sentences > phenomenological Ramsey sentences. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnz3zkaw6qkb776fsqn7vp)) > This list focuses on positive conative states, but there are negative counterparts that qualify equally: disliking, being unwilling, disapproving, refusing to try, and so on. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gmawh879s4yjqs4sj5gssf)) > Primitivism about conative phenomenology is thus equivalent to the following conjunction: there exists a phenomenology of conative mental activity, and that phenomenology is irreducible to any other phenomenology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gmtv58z9xm1yeskf6c80cd)) > Plausibly, this value-commitment is an attitudinal property as well. Compare desiring that p with believing that p is good. Arguably, these are two different states.1 But how can we account for this difference? Both commit to the good- ness of p, after all. The difference, I suggest, is that the desire represents-as-good p, whereas belief represents-as-true p’s being good. In the latter, goodness comes in only at the level of content; in the former, already at the level of attitude. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gn31g934k7c5fqs9rghbsk)) > If nonsensuous representing-as-goodG > is the mark of the conative, then all > conscious conative states exhibit what we may call nonsensuous presenting-as- > goodG > . ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gn540td75mxack9h8j1795)) > The view that the conative aspect of mental life is basic and irreducible to cog- nition and perception is rather standard in philosophy of mind.2 Nonetheless, it may be claimed that although conative states have some properties that cannot be accounted for in perceptual, cognitive, and algedonic terms, none of these are phenomenal properties.3 The phenomenal properties of conative states, if they exist at all, are reducible to other kinds of phenomenal property. In the next section, I attempt to fend off such eliminativist and reductivist challenges to a sui generis conative phenomenology. Through a series of phenomenal contrasts, I argue that there is a conative phenomenology unfamiliar from our perceptual, algedonic, and cognitive life. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnd1rhpr3tzs9bcsz75rfm)) > somnambulist ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gngjs9q23c641k6aj0cy19)) - Note: sleepwalker > One straightforward reductive account of the feeling of doing would equate it with a suitable kind of tactile phenomenology. What it is like to strain to open the door, on this view, is given by the tactile feeling of one’s arm and shoulder pressing against the door; what it is like to clench one’s fist is just what it is like for the hand’s different parts to touch each other with a certain pressure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnkf5tx5m3ehq5z73r0gp0)) > we can experience, more or less at will, first the right hand doing the rubbing and the left hand being rubbed and then the left hand actively rubbing and the right hand passively rubbed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnnkpz592jhxte562qp0sv)) > The strictly tactile phenomenology in those two episodes ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnp2bgw3dy1g0z7pttedg0)) > seems the same, but the overall phenomenology is different. A natural explana- tion of this difference is in terms of which hand is agent and which is patient, so to speak—which hand embodies the active will of the agent and which is merely passive. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gnny7azwygj4abrzn4krx8)) > Just as you make the judgment that you caused your side of the couch to lift, you also make the judgment that your friend caused his side of the couch to lift. Still, there is a straightfor- ward sense in which you feel your own causing of your side of the couch lifting but not your friend’s causing of his side lifting. The feeling of caus- ing is asymmetric, but the causal judgments are symmetric ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gp2ndaj5r4ekb6nngrtz5y)) > Perhaps the phenomenology of agency can be accounted for, not in terms of the cognitive phenomenology of judging that one is the cause, but in terms of the perceptual phenomenology of seeing one’s causal efficacy. This would be a third and distinct reductive account of conative phenomenology, in terms of the combination of tactile and visual phenomenology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gp3cqc32bc2x5z658prn3p)) > It might be suggested that both problems can be overcome if we adduce not only tactile and visual phenomenology but also proprioceptive phenomenology (see already Dewey 1897). Plausibly, one can perceive proprioceptively one’s muscle contractions—and one cannot perceive proprioceptively others’ mus- cle contractions. So perhaps the conative phenomenology of clenching one’s fist could be reduced to the combination of (i) tactile phenomenology of one’s hand’s various parts touching each other, (ii) visual (or for that matter cogni- tive) phenomenology of seeing (or judging) that one caused the fist to clench, and (iii) proprioceptive phenomenology of feeling one’s fist muscles contract- ing. The key ingredient is the last: it gives us access to our own basic actions that we have to nobody else’s. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gpa4hexzy47gdppk47vqmz)) > The key difference here ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gq0nyrhzmegkgzhebczj46)) > is between muscle-contraction and muscle-contracting: the latter brings in the feel of agency, of exercising one’s will, that characterizes the conative domain. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gq0wnxpcafm8t7w9mnngs4)) > the “impatience of the deliberative state” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gqdzcg3ft4a7vd7p2es0ny)) - Note: James 1890 > It is worth noting that acting on one’s decision need not manifest itself in overt behavior. Suppose someone hurts my pride, a barbed retort presents itself to me, but in the end I decide not to respond. My decision results in the absence of any overt behavior. Nonetheless, in not responding I do act on my decision. A certain kind of action is thus still involved—we may call this a negative action. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2gqv248c8rsqzcqy24qkvdc)) > What more can be said about what it is like to try? Plausibly, there is an > intimate connection between the phenomenology of trying and the phenom- > enology of effort: trying always mobilizes effort.25 > This is significant, given that > dedicated discussion of the feeling of effort has a substantial history, going > back at least to Maine de Biran (1812).26 > Laporte (1947) describes the feeling > of effort as a phenomenal vector of force and resistance. We might say, then, > that trying involves the experience of mobilizing force in the face of resistance. > An impressionistic way to think of this feeling is as a sort of nonsensory ana- > log of Wundtian innervation: an invisible, insentient, but still phenomenally > luminous current traveling from will to muscle. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j2h0bd5qn6z9nvkq4jbjqs8d))